Play the NY Times Website Like an Instrument, and Other New Lily Tricks

We like to push the outer envelope of music technology geekdom. But what if you’re also an obsessed web geek? Then you start playing the data encoded in a Website design like nytimes.com as a musical instrument.

A new patching environment called Lily, inspired by tools like Max/MSP, works its magic using JavaScript inside a browser. So turning your browser into a music tool becomes more practical. And Lily supports the network-savvy OpenSoundControl (motto: “it’s not MIDI!”), so you can hook up an OSC controller like the Monome and jam with Firefox and the New York Times.

When the patch starts, the browser enters a DOM inspection mode and mousing over a DOM element highlights the node. Clicking on a node writes the element’s data (its innerHTML value if it’s a text element or the binary data if it’s an image) as a sound file and the file is then loaded in a quicktime player in the patch. The sounds can then be triggered using OSC messages.

Hey, where’d everyone go?

If DOM models don’t exactly get your pulse racing, here’s a strange and elegant physics-based sequencer hooked up to Reaktor. Fans of Processing, that environment is also capable of similar stuff; this is even modeled on the Processing-compatible traer physics library.